Management culture and how to avoid it

No doubt about the suits

From my book, "The Good Manager."

Whoever decided management was some sort of cosmetic
exercise didn’t do the world many favors. Management By Brand Names hasn’t been
a sparkling success, by any standards. I have actually heard accounts of people
in management covens, or whatever these gabfests are called, spending their
time discussing hairstyles, suit labels, and shoes. Other vital topics in this
revelation included where to get nice briefcases and accessories.

That would cost about $2000 an hour, in a room of about 8
people. For that $2000, you could hire a temp to take off some of the load
somewhere for a month. It’s also just possible that these poignant observations
could wait until lunch, or until hell freezes over.

If it were me managing these
clowns, the next comment would be something delicate about where they pick up
their paychecks on the way to the welfare office. They’d also be docked for the
wasted time.

Superficiality is not an asset in
management. Presentation has its moments of relevance, but content and quality
of management performance are the real cultural issues.

The cosmetic element in
management has slobbered downstream to the workplace in Dress For Success,
Selling Yourself, and other sniveling efforts at proving talent.

It’d be interesting to find out
who decided to believe all this guff. Dress Like You Know How To Dress
Yourself Without Using Farm Equipment would do. Nobody “sells themselves”.
At most, they sell the skills they’re prepared to allow you to pay them for,
that they use on the job. Everything else is about what they can get out of a
job.

Then there’s the Management
Ethos, that happy little contradiction in terms. Real managers, those who’ve
somehow dragged themselves away from the fashion parades, do have an ethos, but
it’s the pragmatic version. It’s invariably an ethos they’re likely to survive,
not a myth.

A mystique has arisen around
management which is as ludicrous as it is impractical. The Dynamic Executive,
the Hands On Manager, there’s folklore in vast amounts. Real managers, if they
have the time for adjectives, can find better things to do with it than waste
it on describing themselves.

The class and status imagery of
management is another absurdity, and a major irritant to most people confronted
with it.

Despite many seminars to the
contrary, pomposity and conceit aren’t great social skills. Well, not with
mammals, anyway.

Why the imagery?

To make up for the lack of
substance. Part of the market image of management is essentially pure sales
pitch.

The Executive, that wonderful,
high living ideal of a free spending, self important consumer who doesn’t know
how to cost a biro and has the intelligence of a lemming post-cliff, doesn’t
actually exist outside the idiom.

Of course you need a $5 million
watch. How could you possibly live without a mortgage that would kill any
elephant? You’re big enough to drive seven cars at once, while, of course,
flying a plane. What? You don’t own your own island? You caveman, you.

Even the husband or wife will be
custom made from the original plasticine, and used to be somebody, once.

To some people the trappings of
success are real symbols, to others they’re a result of peer pressure.

Pitiful as both cases are, what
they aren’t are real measures of success.

The inferior person always has to prove superiority.
There, in a rather garish global oversupply of proof, we have the real reason
for the external manifestations of management culture.

Unfortunately for business, this
sort of tacky grandeur is pretty easy to sell to those who don’t know any
better. Some brains can’t handle a job and an image at the same time, and it
eventually shows.

The psychological version of
management culture is equally banal, and it’s there for much the same reason.

This is where the cracks really
become impressive. Many of the psychological approaches are ego-fodder, and
when you’re providing them to starving people, the receptivity is naturally
high. This is Junk Food For The Soul, and the poor shriveled souls think it’s
actual nutrition.

There’s nobody more vulnerable
than an insecure person, and in the bitchy, ultra-competitive, political,
management culture nearly everybody’s insecure to some degree. Arguably worse
is the fact that many of the younger people think it’s normal, and they begin
to get addicted to it. They may wind up as adults needing all this constant
reassurance. If they grow up.

The other built-in murderer of
any sense of proportion or personal perspective is that all these things are
done in peer groups. The Group, which has a default intellectual setting to its
lowest level of intelligence, becomes a working part of the social machinery.

A peer group is a set of
compromises. It’s created by its members to work as a de facto society. In the
workplace, peer groups are simple social functions, but they can become complex
in some environments. They can also be destructive.

All those compromises can make
insecure people feel a lot less secure. Socially weaker members of peer groups
are at a serious disadvantage, and they become more disadvantaged with each new
role or function in a peer group. Send them off to a management camp for a
weekend and what may return may barely qualify as toilet paper, let alone a
human being.

In a real social environment
these peer groups exist naturally from 9 to 5 or whenever the people have to be
in the same room. But in any artificial environment like management culture,
they’re more like Petrie dishes. There’s no way out, and no off switch, and
that phenomenon is pretty prevalent in many management groups.

This is an almost entirely
destructive process. Management has a unique ability to create clashes among
its members. Non-managerial jobs don’t have to turn into debates, or serious
personal rivalries. Nor do they turn into the sort of career events which give
therapists such a good income for decades later.

The Good Manager has quite a few
good methods for dealing with these sickly aspects of management culture:

Talent. The Good Manager is a bit too good to
challenge directly in a peer group in terms of their own skills.

Intelligence. The same applies to any sort of
intellectual challenge. People do not go out of their way to start a
debate knowing they’ll probably lose badly.

Poise. Seeing no need for status symbols, and
not needing any to prove their value, Good Managers will make a point of
being relatively low key, to show up flashy colleagues. They make their
point very effectively, even to the sort of insensitive, thoughtless human
bricks in modern management.

Communications. If necessary, and it usually
isn’t, the Good Manager can tie people in knots with a simple question.
They can’t be out-communicated. They tend to dictate ideas. That
effectively destroys the lowest common denominator approach, and undercuts
the bull. Strangely, not many Good Managers get invited back to groups.

Evasion. The Good Manager will avoid
unnecessary, half baked management groups as a routine thing, and make it
sound like they’re doing The Group a favor, which in some ways they are.
After the Communications phase, The Group will want to leave things that
way.

The fact is that management
culture is little or no use to a Good Manager. It’s an artificial environment,
and a pretty useless, expensive, method of creating exactly the sort of
tensions in the real management culture that the Good Manager is actively
trying to avoid for purely business reasons.

Nor does the Good Manager want to
expose their protégés to that sort of environment. They’ll need those people
exactly whenever there’s any danger of that happening. They don’t need a
Reassurance Addict for a subordinate. Still less do they need someone who’s
going to be turned into a jelly by a peer group.

At most levels of management,
Good Managers will actively block any form of cultural orientation to their
managers which they consider destructive.

They’re not anti-training, or
antisocial, quite the opposite, they’re among the greatest exponents of
training, in particular. Their opposition to management culture “science” comes
from a value judgment, and they’re usually right.

Not all management science is
total bull, but a lot of it is very badly done, and many good ideas are
seriously misinterpreted. Things like “synergy” are perfectly valid, but when
translated into a Tower of Babel in a log cabin, they don’t mean the same
thing. There’s a smell of locker room, and it lingers.

There’s a practical issue, too.
When letting the hair down, how that’s done, and with whom, is always relevant
in any management structure. It’s quite possible to obliterate important
relationships in an external environment in ways which wouldn’t occur to those
parties in the work environment.

The Good Manager simply does not
give a damn about any form of cosmetic management. They don’t work for Avon or
Maybelline, and they’re prepared to admit it.

They’ll be scrupulous about
rewarding and acknowledging actual achievements, but don’t expect them to start
a Lap Dog of the Month Club.

It hasn’t occurred to them that
their managerial role is supposed to be a work of fiction, and it never will.

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